network: 0.632 socket: 0.506 device: 0.429 semantic: 0.333 instruction: 0.300 graphic: 0.296 boot: 0.293 vnc: 0.243 mistranslation: 0.212 other: 0.204 assembly: 0.150 KVM: 0.131 qemu 5.1.0: Add UNIX socket support for netdev socket qemu has a way to connect instances using a socket: -netdev socket,id=str[,fd=h][,listen=[host]:port][,connect=host:port] This can also be used to connect a qemu instance to something else using a socket connection, however there is no authentication or security to the connection, so rather than using a port which can be accessed by any user on the machine, having the ability to use or connect to UNIX sockets would be helpful, and adding this option should be fairly trivial. UNIX sockets can be found in various parts of qemu (monitor, etc) so I believe having this on network would make sense. With the fd= argument/property, you can setup a private socketpair connection already. Is this enough? Thanks for the response. I'm not sure, how would I run qemu with a fd= socketpair on the command line? The wiki (https://wiki.qemu.org/index.php/Documentation/Networking) suggests for example to use: -netdev socket,id=mynet0,listen=:1234 -netdev socket,id=mynet0,connect=:1234 This would allow however anyone on the same network (or in the world if run on a server) to connect to this network and possibly do bad things. Using localhost binding helps but is still risky if there is more than one user on a given machine. Using something like: -netdev socket,id=mynet0,listen=~/.qemu-netsocket -netdev socket,id=mynet0,connect=~/.qemu-netsocket How would one do that with fd= ? [Expired for QEMU because there has been no activity for 60 days.] JFYI I miss the ability to use Unix socket right now.. I'm trying to use vagrant + vagrant-qemu + socket_vmnet on Macbook m1. It'd be MUCH easier to connect QEMU to the socket_vmnet' Unix socket directly w/o any wrappers.. This will be available in the next QEMU release (7.2) under a sligthly different form: "-netdev stream" for TCP socket and "-netdev dgram" for UDP socket. Both support inet and unix sockets. See qemu(1). This was added to support passt: https://passt.top Despite what is said in an earlier comment, qemu(1) has no information on -netdev stream or -netdev dgram. The best help I could find comes from the patch description: https://